A monograph by Yi Fuxian, a University of Wisconsin-Madison demographer and longtime critic of China’s population policies, argues that China’s actual population may be closer to 1.27 billion—not the 1.4 billion officially reported. The gap would be as much as 130 million people, roughly the population of Mexico. And Yi argues the distortion has warped strategic thinking in both China and the U.S., feeding overconfidence in Beijing and anxiety in Washington.

To make his case, Yi points to evidence in the country’s health and education records. Every newborn in China is required to receive a BCG tuberculosis vaccine within 24 hours of birth. Because multi-dose vials must be discarded 30 minutes after opening, each vial yields only about 1.2 to 1.6 usable doses in practice. Between 2018 and 2020, he noted, the government approved roughly 5.8 million vials a year. Yet official statistics claimed more than 14 million births annually. That would mean each vial somehow vaccinated 2.4 babies, which Yi said would be medically and practically impossible nationwide.

Yi also points to discrepancies in the reported size of individual birth cohorts. For instance, the National Bureau of Statistics said 17.7 million babies were born in 2000. But when that cohort reached age 10 in the 2010 census, only about 14.4 million were counted. By the time they graduated middle school in 2015, only about 14.2 million walked across the stage. About 3.5 million people from a single year were unaccounted for.

Yi said he cross-checks census records against school enrollments, hospital births, vaccine batches and household registrations. The picture that emerges, in his analysis, is a pattern of systematic inflation across multiple data sources.

Here is more from the WSJ, via Bob Davis.